[MUD-Dev] newbie

[coder at ibm.net]

On 03/11/97 at 08:12 AM, Marc Eyrignoux <Marc.Eyrignoux at efrei.fr> said:
>Hello everybody 

Hello!

>I'm new to this list, so I'm going to introduce myself. 

Writing as list owner:

  Welcome!

The rest of this message is not written as list owner.

>I'm a french student in an engeneering school, located near Paris.  My
>project for the year is to create a MUD. The project will stop on April,
>it's a bit short, as Nathan said to me, but we won't do a large world. 
>Next year we will continue what we began this year, but our game will be
>playable in March of this year. 

Interesting.  I've found that some very good products can result from such
force fed projects.  It is as if the very necessity to do it quickly spurs
greater reduction in the design and resultant higher quality.

>As I have been in the list since 1 week, I've read your mails.  I'm
>really impressed by their length. It's 1h30 long to read everything...

<kof>  A lof of new members observe that.  Actually I take it as a
compliment to the list.  Trivial discussions don't require much in the way
of messages or message length.  Real signal and deep discussion tend to
require more words, which suggests that this list really is fulfilling its
purpose of high quality high signal discussion.

Just to warn you:  Traffic here tends to be cyclic and bursty.  It seems
that the typical pattern is for the list to laze along at around a couple
messages a day, and slowly build up to 10 or so a day.  Traffic then
suddenly bursts, peaking for a day or two at 20 - 50 messages per day, and
then collapses.  Then, for a few days there's nothing, and the process
starts again.

>But I'm really happy to have to read all of that.  Of course I'm not
>alone: I'm the boss (please excuse me for my vocabulary, I've never been
>to England) of a 9 members team.  Our client will be in Java, our server
>in C++ under Unix. Sounds like Nathan's mud, I know, but it's an original
>idea. 

Care to tell us more about the base design of your system and what sort of
game you intend?

>...We
>would like to create situations which encourage role-playing. 

Exactly what is and is not RP, as well as what are valid means to
encourage RP has been heavily discussed without much result here.  Its an
emotive area.

>As a part of the client, I'm really interested with String-parsing. I've
>watched at what you said, and I would like to know how to get the GNU
>sources that JC dealt with. 

I'd recommend either of the AFTP sites rtfm.mit.edu or sunsite.unc.edu. 
Both have large GNU databases.

>I would still like to know if a transactionnal database like Oracle is
>really efficient and usefull for what we want to do (a lot of NPC,
>descriptions, ..., but simple requests). 

I haven't worked with Oracle.  (Jon Lambert?)  I'd recommend doing some
performance trials on a low-end target machine.  Just set up a very simple
test proglem to do a very large number representative of transactions very
quickly, and see how high you can pump the rate up for what sort of CPU
and resource consumption.  My suspicion is that you'll find it won't scale
quickly enough.

My temptation however would be to use one of the lighter weight DB
libraries.  See the free DB list (http://cuiwww.unige.ch/~scg/FreeDB/) for
examples.

>Why don't you prefer separate files? 

Seperate files for what?

>Another question for JC: what is an account/softcode negociater?

I don't know what you are referring to here.  Can you expand or detail
your question a bit more?

>More generally, what is the distinction between softcode and hardcode? 

This is a pretty murky area.  Loosely, hardcode is the code that the MUD
server is written in, something like C, C++, Java, etc.  Softcode
comparitively is the scripting or programming language which is internal
to or used internally to the MUD server.  A good example of the seperation
are the LP servers, with the servers written in C (the hardcode) and the
softcode using the internal LPC language.  About the only remaining
examples of pure hardcode servers are Ogham and Aber.  For those the world
definition needs to be written in the hardcode language (C in both cases),
which means modifying the actual server sources directly, and compiled
along with the server to produce an executable which runs that particular
game and no other.

>I'm really happy to be in this list. 

Again, welcome!

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...